WHAT WE ALL KNOW, WHAT WE ALL FORGET:
The Arts, Nature, and the Human Spirit
This book explores a variety of themes in human thinking concerning the arts, nature, and the life of the spirit over the course of more than twenty-five hundred years. It calls attention to a number of findings in recent science which bear on these themes, and it connects them with our experience today. It questions purportedly authoritative presumptions about the arts currently taught as fact in schools and museums. Quotations from philosophers and scientists, musicians and poets, theorists and critics are essential to the text; they are rarely paraphrased, so that the precise meaning and character of the original is conveyed. In this the book is a kind of gathering, as if in one place and at one time, of a selection of thinkers through the millennia. Their statements, taken together, describe a broadly coherent view of the world, a view still possible in the twenty-first century.
The book resembles an academic text only in that its textual sources are carefully noted. It is intended as an entertainment offered to anyone who enjoys mental expeditions of this kind. I hope that its claims, based in my experience and thought, will ring true and seem reasonable to the reader, measured against his or her own experience of the arts and of the natural world.
Feel free to browse by clicking on individual chapters listed below, or click here for a pdf of the entire book. Please contact me if you are interested in a printed copy.